


and this is your baptism

by partingxshot



Category: Star Trek: Deep Space Nine
Genre: Fix-It, Future Fic, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-02-03
Updated: 2013-02-03
Packaged: 2017-11-28 01:30:22
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 702
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/668724
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/partingxshot/pseuds/partingxshot
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He cannot differentiate between sight and memory of sight.</p>
            </blockquote>





	and this is your baptism

**Author's Note:**

> I found myself with a pretty bad Vorta Problem the other day.

He wakes up.

The sense of heavy green suspension fluid radiates in through his thin eyelids, too bright for sleeping, but he cannot differentiate between sight and memory of sight. He has never known anything else. Perhaps he has always been awake, clipped edges kept from stumbling into thought. 

Now shadows move across his consciousness as his lashes push quickly, silently, against the dip beneath his eyelids.

When he feels his face surfacing, air frigid against his tender skin as the fluid drains away, his eyes open without hesitation.

He senses before he sees. A presence, too close for comfort and too beautiful to contemplate. Tall and worn and smoothed at the corners, blurring in and out around the light burning into him through insufficient pupils.

Founder, eight lives of him scream, and he collapses (selfishly, helplessly) into immortal arms as he suddenly remembers what it feels like to breathe.

He is being asked a question, and he feels it reverberating with the chill air on the damp hair at the back of his neck.

“I live to serve,” he chokes out, bones trembling. There are old, proud pieces of himself circling just beyond his reach, and they fly out of sight as soon as he tries to bring them into focus. His eyesight is so poor.

The constructed muscles stiffen. 

“–ou don’t. Do you remember me?”

He tries pulling himself to his feet, though they are as unstable as any animal direct from the womb. Hands work to steady him as though they are not made from mountains, clenching his shoulders as if Weyoun couldn’t crumble beneath their weight. He flinches violently backwards.

His fingers prickle, regaining feeling down to the tips.

“You are the–”

(A runaway shuttle, a death sentence, a redemption wide as sin behind a flash of convoluted perverted inspiration playing like lightning in his genes)

He feels his supplications choking to death inside himself.

Odo tilts his head to the side, superfluous features blank, all-seeing eyes serene. The gesture is that of a solid, but he holds himself like his spine is too grand and proud to exist, and the edges of him blur on a level that is not really there. 

“I don’t understand.” Weyoun cannot see very far, but the grand expanse of one billion blended somethings on the horizon must be the Link. The sky is like dawn breaking on his own home world. “You were lost.”

But that isn’t what’s wrong in him, stretching at his ribcage like something trapped and transplanted. 

“I came back,” the Founder says. Odo says.

Weyoun examines his own hands, spreading them wide until the skin stretches, turning them in front of his face. They shine, wet all over, and he has dirtied the – dirtied Odo’s form. He is very sorry.

But he does _not_ feel an apology forming behind his teeth. 

His knees almost buckle again with the shock.

His gaze flashes back to Odo’s face as he struggles to find something in those smooth lines to rationalize, to explain.

“You – I’m defective again!” He feels abruptly sick, the thing within his chest vibrating at uneven intervals with the rhythm of the rest of the planet, his throat closing up because why is he _breathing–_

“You’re _not,”_ Odo growls, indeterminate but powerful emotion blooming out from center of his stiff features. Weyoun feels an instinctive reaction of fear. Eight lifetimes tell him to raise his hands in submission to a will greater than his own, but his body doesn’t move to bow.

Odo is all-powerful, he is omniscient and omnipresent and he is _none of those things at all._

There is a hand resting gently on his shoulder, though he doesn’t remember time moving forward. He cannot differentiate between sight and memory of sight. Now he does not flinch.

“Why?” he asks, eyes opening wider even as he feels his fists closing at his sides, which is a miracle in itself because never in a million years did he think he could _close_ something. Not to them.

“I don’t think I get to decide that anymore,” Odo says.

The planet blurs into vivid rippling watercolors that eight Weyouns didn’t understand how to see.

He doesn’t feel blind.


End file.
